


In Pursuit of an After

by PowerfulLight



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, First Time, Mutual Masturbation, Planet Naboo (Star Wars), Porn with Feelings, Post-TLJ, Technically canon divergent, maybe? - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-01 10:55:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20813966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PowerfulLight/pseuds/PowerfulLight
Summary: A shared bath reveals a secret between Ben and Rey





	In Pursuit of an After

**Author's Note:**

> Notes at the end!

The bath in Rey’s room in the royal palace of Naboo’s lake country seems excessive. By palace standards it’s average. She had seen Finn and Rose and Poe’s rooms, all had a tub of this size. To Rey it might as well be one of the lakes outside her window. She stands in it before she fills it up, tries to gauge how deep she will be when it’s full. For a moment she remembers falling into that hole on Ach-To, remembers thrashing in the black water until finally she found the surface, gasping for air. She does not want to repeat that feeling.

She fills the bath with hot water, adds some of the sweet smelling oils that rest on the edge of the tub. Floral scented steam coats the room in a sheen of condensation, despite the cracked window bringing in a cool breeze. Rey has never had a bath to herself before. At the bath house in Niima Outpost they crammed as many people as they could into a shallow tub of icy water. It was sometimes refreshing, in the heat of the day. Rey can’t imagine it would feel nice now that the temperate air of Naboo passes her skin, raises goosebumps over her towelled body. It feels wasteful, that all this water is for her alone. Fifteen people could have gotten clean in this on Jakku. But water isn’t as precious a commodity on Naboo. The people here can drink their fill and bathe and swim to their hearts content. Here, it would only be wasteful if she didn’t get in.

She’s about to step in, has just lowered the towel passed her breasts when there is a knock at the bedroom door, followed by a deep voice calling her name, “Rey?”

“Come in.” She calls to Kylo Ren, though she is not sure if she should call him that name any longer. It has been over a month since he had defected from the First Order, showing up at the temporary Resistance base on Tatooine a filthy mess of blood and debris. Two major things have kept him from being executed or flat out murdered in his sleep, the valuable intel he brought with him and his mother. Those also brought privileges not bestowed upon normal prisoners of war. When properly guarded, like at the palace here in Naboo, he had free reign to wander and work as he pleased. Even with these rights he could still fall into his sullen moods, remaining the ‘Supreme Asshole’, as Poe called him. He did not have his lightsaber. At the moment, that belonged to Rey.

The door opens and Kylo walks in, nose buried in a datapad. He gets like this, sometimes. There’s a boyish excitement when he thinks he may have made a breakthrough on a plan or mission. He gets lost in his thoughts. Ben again, it seems. “I’ve been going over the blueprints for Hux’s flagship and I think the best points of attack could be-”

He is in the bathroom doorway before he comes back to the present. Ben finally looks up at her and freezes, mouth still hanging open from whatever word just died on his lips. A blush creeps up his cheeks, even turning his ear bright red. His mouth opens and shuts once, twice, three times before finally he speaks, his voice higher than normal. “Do you need a towel?”

“I already have one.” She gestured to the one wrapped just under her chest.

His reaction puzzles her. When the situation had been reversed, the Force connecting them at a moment when he was shirtless, he had almost revelled in her discomfort. She hadn’t been uncomfortable at seeing a _man_ shirtless. Nudity was no stranger on Jakku, even out of the bathhouses. She had been uncomfortable at seeing _him_ exposed, at what the sight had done to her. She wondered if his reaction came from the same place. Rey had never considered herself as desirable. She had a nice body, a capable body that provided for her. Her body had carried her through the desert, scavenged for scrap in the scorching heat of day. She has reset bones, fallen sick and recovered. Now, she has even touched the stars.

“I can come back later.” He tells her but makes no move to leave. His eyes are searching hers, searching for something she can’t name. Rey feels as though she is on the precipice of something. The turning of a wheel that has been in motion for a long time finally halted. Behind his eyes she can see him calculating their stolen moments. A hand pressed against the small of her back in a meeting, the brushing of fingers under a table in the mess hall, his face inches from hers as they spar.

“You can join me,” Her voice sounds strange to her, both more confident and more terrified than she expected. “If you would like.”

He waits, maybe she will change her mind, laugh at him and tell him to get out. When she doesn’t do any of those things he nods once and, his eyes never leaving hers, uses the Force to shut the bedroom door from across the room.

Silence hangs between them as he pulls off his tunic. It’s not black but a dark enough gray that it may as well be. He folds it and places it gently on the floor. His pants rest at his waist, low enough that she can just see the v-shaped mound of his hips. The sight drives something to knot in her stomach. Next come his boots and socks, which he kicks off and sets next to his top.

Now they are equally uncovered, neither one of them has an advantage over the other. Kylo fingers the drawstring of his pants, lifting an eyebrow at Rey. A silent question made clear through their bond.

_Do you want this?_

“Yes.” She answers him out loud. Her voice in the quiet room emboldens her and she lets the towel drop. She can nearly feel his eyes over her body, spreading heat every place he looks. His breath catches when he takes her in and for all the force has given her Rey thinks,

_This. This way he looks at me. That is power._

Now it is his turn to bare himself to her. Slowly, without dropping his stare on her body, he pulls loose the drawstring of his trousers and pushes them down his hips. His cock springs up, freed from it’s confinement. Like all things about him it is big and imposing, thicker than ones she had seen on Jakku. He’s hard and the sight is gratifying to Rey in a way she hadn’t imagined it would be. She sucks in a breath at the sight of it. This must please him because his lips quirk into the smallest of smiles and he steps into the bath. Steeling her resolve, Rey follows him in. He goes immediately to the deepest point of the bath, the centre, where the water rests just below his nipples even as he stands. Rey stays close to the edge, where she can touch the ground easily.

Because she doesn’t know what else to say, needs to shift his focus so she doesn’t combust underneath it, Rey says, “It’s much nicer, than on Ach-To.”

Ben’s brows furrow in confusion, “Surely that isn’t your only experience with water.”

“Desert planet, remember?” Her face feels hot but she tells herself it’s just the steam coming off the water, tinting them both pink and slicking their hair to their faces. “We had a bath house, in Niima, but it was public and the water was always freezing.”

“Is that why you’re gripping the edge like that? You don’t know how to swim?” He smiles at her.

Rey does have a memory, of splashing around in a great body of water, sputtering as waves crash against her face but laughing at them. Kicking around in the surf with a man’s warm hand pressed against her stomach and back and a gravelly voice saying with joy, “_That’s it, kid, you’re getting it_.”

This memory is not hers, so she just says, “No.”

“I can teach you,” he tells her before adding, sheepishly, “If you’d like? Tomorrow we could go out to one of the lakes.”

“I would like that.” Her fear of water is something she knows she needs to get over. It feels much more achievable knowing that he would be by her side. Tentatively, Rey walks out to him, the water providing a strange sort of resistance to her movement. Now she’s less than an arms length away from him, closer than she has been in two weeks. Ben looks down at her, his breaths are deep and when he exhales the air feels cool against the sweat on her face. “Can I touch you?”

He answers silently, a single nod, his eyes not leaving her face as her hand reaches up to push his hair back behind his ear. Gently, she traces the crest of his ear down to the soft skin of his earlobe. His eyes close and Ben let’s out a soft moan. Then her finger tips brush along his cheek, her thumb traces his scar.

“How does it feel?”

“It doesn’t hurt anymore.” He tells her and Rey feels a pang of guilt. She has seen inside his mind and knows that he forgave her long ago, that he was never even really mad. Still, it hurts to know she hurt him when he already had so much pain in his life.

“And how does it feel to look at it?” She wonders out loud, “To be reminded of it every time you look in a mirror.”

“I don’t notice it as much anymore.” He admits to her, and adds more candidly, “I was never much of a looker anyway.”

“I disagree.”

Ben cracks his eyes open and smiles down at her, soft and sweet. “Can I touch you as well?”

It’s Rey’s turn to nod and when she does Ben closes the distance between them, placing his hands on her waist. His hands are big enough that his middle fingers nearly meet on her back. The mixture of warm water, his scent, and his touch are heady and Rey presses her front to him, leaning her head on his broad chest.

“Where did you get this scar on your shoulder?” He asks. Rey can see it without looking in a mirror, she’s had it for so long. It’s about four inches long and it healed in a jagged, puckered line. Plutt had made her wait until it was infected before sparing any bacta patches for her.

“I fell while scavenging in an old Star Destroyer.” She tells him. “I cut it on the way down.”

“Was it bad?”

Rey remembers the feeling of hitting the ground after her fall. She had screamed for two hours before realising no one was coming to help, that she would have to get out herself or die in those ruins. She had not noticed the gash, her body ached so much from the impact and her slow climb out. When she made it back to her AT-AT she was covered in grime and blood but she was alive. And she had the scrap she had gone in for.

“At the time, yes.”

Ben shifts and before Rey realises what he’s doing he bends down and presses his lips to the scar. She gasps at the contact but her gasp morphs into something more carnal as he kisses his way up the scar, to the nape of her neck. He rests there, breathing deeply and unevenly into the spot where her shoulder meets her neck. His cock is pressed between them, astonishingly hard. His hips move just a fraction and he moans at the friction. Her hands find his face and she turns up to look at him.

They have kissed twice before.

The first time Ben had just defected, crashing his TIE Silencer into the open desert outside the resistance’s base. He was filthy and bloody and Rey had been so relieved to see him alive that she had pressed her lips to his once she pulled him from the smoking cockpit.

The second had been a month later, as they fled that base under First Order fire. Everyone was evacuating. Poe was delegating orders and everyone dropped off into different rooms and hallways as they ran down the bases main gangway. Suddenly everyone else had gone and it was just Ben and Rey, alone with the flashing lights and blaring siren of the emergency alarm. Ben was to go get his mother and put her on the Falcon, Rey was going the opposite way, getting in an X-Wing and providing cover to the retreating fleet. That kiss lasted a moment but all their hopes for the future had been transferred between their lips. And then Rey was going and Ben was left to watch her throw herself into the fray.

They had few moments to themselves since them. Ben was warily watched by others and they both had regular duties to complete on base. On smaller bases and on ship they slept in communal bunks. This was the first time they were truly alone together.

Rey presses her lips to Ben’s and it’s like when they touched hands but amplified. The Force seems to hum around them, a soft buzz that brings with it an overwhelming sense of peace. Rey’s hands drift down from Ben’s face, tracing the lines of his chest, his stomach. Ben’s hands follow hers, tracing the plains of her stomach up to her breasts. Her breasts are less than a handful for him and if it were anyone else she might feel insecure. But this is Ben, who has seen her deepest fears and her lowest moments and still joined her in this bath, who moans under her touch like it’s a gift she has given him.

Ben runs him thumb over one of her nipples, rolling it in a way that makes Rey shudder against him. He takes the encouragement and does the same with his other hand, palming both of her breasts as he kisses her.

It feels good, and Rey wants to make him feel good. So she lets her hands fall to his waist, to his cock bobbing between them. She’s only able to get one stroke in before Ben pulls away, gasping. He’s backed himself up to the far wall of the bath, steadying himself on it’s edge.

“I’m sorry.” Rey immediately apologises, her cheeks growing hot. The rejection burns her from the inside out.

“It’s not that. Please, Rey, don’t apologise. You didn’t do anything wrong. You have no idea how much I want that.” He says with a pitiful laugh. Ben drops his eyes down to the water between them. He starts again but trails off, “I’ve just never,”

Oh. She hadn’t expected that, because of his age and the time he spent at Luke’s temple with other young people. From what Poe has said, about growing up on Rebel and Resistance bases, that seems to be what young people do when they are all thrown together in close quarters.

“It’s okay, I haven’t either.” She confesses. His eyes snap back up to hers and he looks relieved. Rey thinks to be offended for a moment but with their bond he is able to push out what he means, he is happy to not be the only one feeling lost. “We could learn together, if you’d like that?”

Ben swallows, his shoulders relaxing, “Yes, I would.”

Rey thinks for a moment before asking, “Well, what do you like when you’re alone?”

“When I’m alone?” Ben’s voice goes uncharacteristically high for a moment before he coughs and starts again. “I haven’t done it alone either.”

“Ever?” Rey can’t hide the shock in her voice. “You’ve never masturbated?”

“No, I haven’t.” Ben confesses, “My mind was never my own and then after, well, I guess I haven’t been able to get over the shame he made me feel.”

They do not need to name who He is. Snoke’s presence has tainted enough of their time together.

“Would it help if we did it together?” Rey asks with earnest. Ben feels his mouth dry up. Just because he has never completed the act itself doesn’t mean he hasn’t thought of it. And thinking of Rey doing it, and doing it with him, is nearly enough to bring him to his end before they’ve really begun. He is incapable of speaking, telling her how much he would like that, so he just nods to her.

Rey stretches a hand out to him and he goes to her, meeting her in the middle once again. More cautsiously than before Ben leans down to kiss her. Rey entwines her fingers with his and for a few moments, as he works up his courage, they stay like that. An errant thought springs up in Ben’s mind,

_After the war, _ _we could do this every night, we could have a little house near a lake, we could have a-_

He stops before his traitorous mind can finish. It is cruel to think that far ahead, when a great number of terrible things could befall them. He reminds himself to be grateful for this. Kissing and holding hands and existing together in one moment instead of many.

Letting go of one of his hands, Ben feels Rey’s fingers circle his wrist. She does not break their kiss as she brings his hand between them but she does open her eyes, as he opens his. Her hand covers his own and with her nimble guidance she helps him palm himself.

They go slow at first, working together to feel the expanse of his shaft, how thick he is. Soon she drops her hand, letting him decide what he want to do. Ben may not have done it before but he knows what to do, he has seen the errant holo. He circles his cock from it’s base with his palm and gives one firm tug.

It’s nearly too much, all of it. Rey and the sensation of his hand and her soft moans into his mouth. She must be able to sense his turmoil, surely it’s rolling off of him in waves, because she moves to kiss his chest, just above his heart. Her breath is shaky against him. As he looks down he can see that her hand has disappeared under the water, pressed between her legs. Her minstrations cause ripples to form at the waters surface and while Ben can’t see much the mental imagery of what she’s doing is enough to drive him back to his task.

He tries again, slowly. He tries rubbing his thumb over his cock’s head but finds the sensation vaguely numbing after prolonged exposure so he goes back to pumping his cock into his hand. Soon his speed begins to pick up, now his hand isn’t the only thing moving, his hips shift and reach to heighten the sensation. Moans escape his lips, along with other sounds that might embarrass him if Rey was not right there with him, her own pleasure spilling out from her lips.

He is close, so close to that peak which has been building since he stepped into the bath with her. Rey’s hand has picked up speed, her breath coming hot and fast against his chest.

“Ben,” she cries out before her body goes stiff and tight.

That is all it takes for Ben to spill over, his name from her lips while she cries out in pleasure. Underneath the warp of the water he sees white shoot out from his tip in thick, short ropes before getting lost in the movement of the bath. Ben tries to stifle his grunts into the top of her head, burying his face in her hair. He feels like a wire pulled tight finally stretched to breaking. His release leaves him feeling boneless.

They both rest their weight against each other, held up only by the other’s reluctance to let go. They hold onto the moment as long as they can, until the water is no longer pleasant and the night breeze turns chilly. They kiss again, many times, but don’t reach for each other in the same way. It is an ineviblility that they will come together again. The pull is too strong, they want it too badly. They both need time to process their new developments, to know what this means for them.

With war there is a great During and if you are lucky, or unlucky enough, there is an After as well. They will not surrender their After, what their After has the potential to be if each is so lucky, for the desperation of the now. It takes time to do things right.

Some things are worth waiting for.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey there, thanks for reading! I've never written anything like this before and it's only my second time posting a story on Ao3 so hopefully it wasn't a complete disaster!
> 
> I'm on Twitter as Powerful_Dark


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